In an era dominated by digital technology, the exhibition The Body Electric proposed by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (United States) from 30 March to 21 July 2019, explores the themes of the real and the virtual, the organic and the artificial, moving from the physical world to the screen and vice versa.
Video cameras record private moments and public performances, photographs capture alternate characters, and digital avatars simulate human behavior. Together, they reveal the ways technology changes our collective understanding of the body, daily life, and sense of self. From inviting and familiar to provocative and disturbing, the works on display move nimbly from the material world to screen space and vice versa. Reimagined for the exhibition, a newly created installation by Joan Jonas fuses the physical world and its representation, while performance footage by the Wooster Group offers a frenetic meditation on the pervasive presence of technology and the merging of body and screen.
Works by Sanja Iveković, Howardena Pindell, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Cindy Sherman and Amalia Ulman trace a story of artists who transform camera lenses on their bodies, creating personal performance spaces, both through the camera Portapak from the 60s both with today's selfies. Embodied beings and digital avatars populate contributions by Laurie Anderson, Ed Atkins, Pierre Huyghe and Sidsel Meineche Hansen, while sculptures by Robert Gober and Anicka Yi and an immersive installation by Trisha Baga explore the slippery ambiguity of hovering materials between digital and analog, the real and rendered.
For Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sondra Perry and Martine Syms, the camera lens creates a space to rethink the representation of sociopolitical identities and to question the structures that govern our understanding of race and gender. The presentation ends with works by Josh Kline, Carolyn Lazard, Candice Lin and Patrick Staff and Marianna Simnett which reflect on the malleability of the body, talking about themes of care, surgery and chemical and biological processes imperceptible to the human eye.
The exhibit continues in the Main Lobby with Zach Blas' Icosahedron (2019), an artificially intelligent crystal ball.
